7 - ‘Significant gestures to the past’: formal processes and visionary moments in Tippett's Triple Concerto

Summary

‘Significant gestures to the past’ is a phrase that has been used in summarising the retrospective qualities of the three large-scale works Tippett completed in the late 1970s: the Fourth Symphony (1976–7), Fourth String Quartet (1977–8) and Triple Concerto (1978–9). These works are related not only by virtue of their chronological proximity, but also by a number of shared features, not the least of which is their adoption of cyclic formal principles. The Triple Concerto for violin, viola, cello and orchestra, being the last to be composed, assumes a uniquely retrospective position which incorporates both the immediate past (namely the other works in this trilogy) and the more remote past. Its range of retrospection is captured across various commentaries. For example, the composer himself states that in the second interlude of the concerto he ‘felt impelled to quote some of the dawn music from the concluding scene of The Midsummer Marriage’; and Arnold Whittall suggests that the concerto's adoption ‘of extended lyric melody …permit[s] the clearer use of focused harmonies …which hint at the old style of extended tonality’; while Meirion Bowen reminds us that after their initial cadenzas ‘the three soloists …join together to play music that is explicitly based upon the coda of the [Fourth String] [Q]uartet’. The act of self-quotation to which Bowen alludes – an aspect of the Triple Concerto's intertextuality – involves music from the Fourth Quartet which the composer regarded as evoking the numinous, or transcendental.